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IT TOOK TRUMP ONLY TWENTY-FOUR DAYS TO SELL OUT UKRAINE  
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Susan B. Glasser
February 13, 2025
The New Yorker
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_ Trump's first formal phone call with Putin could hardly have been
more ominous—a clear sign that the American President who praised
Russia’s war on its neighbor as an act of strategic “genius” now
intends to force a ceasefire on Putin’s terms. _

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Has Vladimir Putin ever had a better few days in Washington? Donald
Trump [[link removed]], just four weeks
into his second term, has executed a breathtaking pivot toward Moscow,
reversing course after years of ruptured relations between the U.S.
and Russia that resulted from Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
First, Trump signed off on gutting the U.S. Agency for International
Development, delighting the Russian government, whose spokeswoman
called it “a machine for interfering” in other countries’
affairs. Also on the chopping block may soon be Radio Free Europe, a
Cold War legacy project whose coverage of Putin’s Russia has long
infuriated the Kremlin. “Yes, shut them down,” Trump’s
billionaire buddy and sometimes Putin interlocutor Elon Musk tweeted
over the weekend.

Then, on Wednesday, the U.S. Senate voted to confirm the former
Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s controversial
nominee to become the director of National Intelligence. Gabbard has,
like Trump himself, often amplified Russian talking points about the
war in Ukraine—a key reason Mitch McConnell, the former Senate
Republican leader, refused to vote for her. But he was the only
holdout in a Senate Republican Conference that, as recently as
Gabbard’s confirmation hearing last month, included a number of
G.O.P. senators said to be queasy about her nomination. These were the
stalwarts who once vowed to stand with Ukraine until it beat back
Russia. Now they don’t even dare stand against a single Trump
nominee.

That same day, Trump held his first formal phone call with Putin since
returning to the White House. It could hardly have been more ominous
for Ukraine—as clear a sign as possible that the American President
who praised Russia’s war on its neighbor as an act of strategic
“genius” now intends to force a ceasefire on Putin’s terms. The
call, according to Trump’s report about it on his social-media feed,
featured chummy references to the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union
during the Second World War and a decision to “immediately” launch
peace talks. Only afterward did Trump call Ukraine’s President,
Volodymyr Zelensky. It was all too obvious which of the two combatants
he favored.

“Do you view Ukraine as an equal member of this peace process?”
Trump was later asked by a reporter in the Oval Office. “Umm,” he
said, taking such a lengthy pause that the silence itself was answer
enough. “It’s an interesting question,” he finally replied. “I
think they have to make peace. Their people are being killed, and I
think they have to make peace. I said that was not a good war to go
into”—as if Ukraine had had a choice about an unprovoked attack by
more than a hundred thousand Russian troops—“and I think they have
to make peace.”

After Putin launched his invasion—three years ago this month—Joe
Biden condemned the Russian leader as a killer and a thug, sent tens
of billions of dollars in U.S. military assistance, and vowed to stand
with Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” Whenever peace talks came
up, Biden promised that the U.S. would undertake “nothing about
Ukraine without Ukraine.” But Trump, on Wednesday, seemed to go out
of his way to humiliate Ukraine, volunteering that he and Putin would
“probably” meet soon, in Saudi Arabia, with Zelensky pointedly not
invited. Trump even appeared to adopt the Kremlin’s bloody imperial
theory of the case for why Russia should be able to keep territory
illegally seized from Ukraine, since, after all, “they fought for
that land.” No wonder gleeful pundits on Moscow state television
were soon crowing about Russia’s “big success.”

For months, some of Trump’s more conventional Republican enablers
have been gaslighting the American public, European allies, and
embattled Ukraine by advancing the notion that Trump, once reinstalled
in office, would be a sort of a second coming of Ronald Reagan,
determined to stand tough against the Russians and to deliver a fair
deal for Ukraine achieved by Reagan’s signature approach of “peace
through strength.” You could almost hear Trump laughing as he made a
mockery of those apologists in his Oval Office appearance. The man is
who he is. He still admires Putin and still couldn’t care less about
Ukraine. “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they
must” might as well be Trump’s personal motto. Of course, he was
always going to pressure Ukraine to trade land for peace,
international law and national sovereignty be damned. As for American
guarantees to secure Ukraine against future Russian incursions? Forget
about it.

Video From The New Yorker: Swift Justice: A Taliban Courtroom in
Session
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In case anyone was tempted to dismiss Trump’s words as a mere
negotiating tactic, two of the President’s Cabinet secretaries were
dispatched to Europe on errands that underscored the degree to which
Trump had sided with Putin. In Brussels, Trump’s new Defense
Secretary, Pete Hegseth
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lectured European allies about how the U.S. can’t be worrying about
their security anymore and effectively ruled out any chance for
Ukraine to join _NATO_. By peremptorily shutting the door to Ukraine,
Hegseth not only foreclosed the kind of arrangement that might secure
Ukraine from future Russian aggression but also ceded a key point of
leverage over Putin—before a single bargaining session. Trump’s
Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent
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meanwhile, was sent to Ukraine—not with additional aid but with a
demand from Trump that the besieged government in Kyiv compensate the
U.S. for its past assistance by agreeing to supply some five hundred
billion dollars in rare-earth minerals. Biden used to frame
America’s role in Ukraine as that of a xxxxxx in the global contest
between autocracies and democracies. And Trump? He seems to be going
for something more like a Mob shakedown: pay up, or we’ll let Putin
eat you alive. This, too, is vintage Trump. In fact, his first
Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, made a famous outburst at the
Pentagon, in 2017, when he called the President a “fucking moron,”
that was prompted, in part, by his anger at Trump likening American
soldiers to mercenaries who should fight only for countries that pay.

The timing of the decision to preëmptively rule
out _NATO_ membership for Ukraine, on the eve of the annual Munich
Security Conference, seemed like one of those deliberate Trump trolls,
practically inviting unfavorable comparisons to Neville
Chamberlain’s disastrous Munich “peace in our time” deal with
Hitler on the eve of the Second World War. As Carl Bildt, the veteran
European diplomat and former Prime Minister of Sweden, commented,
“It’s certainly an innovative approach to a negotiation to make
very major concessions even before they have started. Not even
Chamberlain went that low in 1938. That Munich ended very bad
anyhow.”

The selling out of Ukraine was an inevitable consequence, no doubt, of
America’s decision to reëlect Trump—the car crash that we’ve
been watching unfold in slow motion since the evening of November 5th.
For those who have been warning about Trump’s plans for Ukraine,
Wednesday’s revelations felt like the crash had finally happened.
John Bolton, the hawkish Republican who served as Trump’s
national-security adviser and who has since publicly turned on him,
said that his former boss had already “effectively surrendered to
Putin” and appears prepared to force Ukraine to accede to “a
settlement that could have been written in the Kremlin.”

The German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, quite possibly a lame duck given
upcoming elections in which his party’s share in the polls has
collapsed to around fifteen per cent, blustered about Europe refusing
to accept a “dictated peace.” But, in reality, who’s going to
stop Trump? On the campaign trail last year, he used to brag that he
would solve the Ukraine war in twenty-four hours. He broke that
promise, but in the twenty-four days since he’s returned to power
he’s given a brazen indication of how he plans to do so. Christmas
came early for Putin this year. ♦

_Susan B. Glasser
[[link removed]], a staff
writer at The New Yorker, has a weekly column on life in Washington
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a host of the Political Scene podcast
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She is also a co-author of “The Divider: Trump in the White House,
2017-2021
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_Since its founding, in 1925, The New Yorker
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_Today, The New Yorker continues to stand apart for its rigor,
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* Donald Trump
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* Vladimir Putin
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* Russia
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* Ukraine
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* Volodymyr Zelensky
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